Bagels and blankets

Everyone … I’m still sick (not COVID!) so here is the next chapter of the sort-of-memoir I wrote in Melbourne’s first lockdown. You can find the first chapter here. Probably best to read that first, if you fancy. Or just come back when I’m back on my feet and walking the magnolia-ed streets of my suburb once more!

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CHAPTER TWO

But let’s rewind a little bit. Let’s go back to that dastardly day when I – like many others - lost my job. You should know that I did not immediately take to my bed. Instead I did a phone interview with my journalist friend Wendy to help promote my new book. 

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m FINE!!” I replied in a high voice. “No wait. I’m not fine. Why did I say I’m fine? I’m not.”

Next Wendy and I tee-ed up the photo shoot to accompany said article. As you do when you’ve had a major life crisis.

I limped – possibly emotionally and leggily – through the days between interview and photo, letting my family know what had happened to try and make it feel real and making a short term plan to keep myself financially afloat. 

I developed a cough and a sore throat and spiralled into some late night Google searches for ‘COVID 19’ but thankfully nothing came of it.

While I was waiting for my sore throat to go away and photo day to arrive, I asked my blog readers to chip in to help me pay for the hosting of my website and internet costs.

I wanted to keep publishing stories on my own site and at least try and create some semblance of a work routine in my days. Instead of writing for an employer, I would write for my own blog and my own readers, I thought. So I began doing that. I launched into a flurry of activity, publishing recipes and researching feel-good but non-cheesy stories that might help my readers navigate their days a little more easily. I was determined to give them their money’s worth, supposing they DID decide to support me.

Luckily my blog’s readers are absolute legends. They chipped in what they could afford, ultimately donating enough money to keep my blog up and running while we navigated those strange days. 

I can’t tell you how much this meant to me at the time and still … now. 

I had spent countless hours over the preceding 14 years writing and publishing literally thousands (5143 to be exact) of paywall-free stories, tutorials, recipes on my blog Meet Me At Mike’s. 

I was so humbled by the number of people who donated small and large amounts to help me keep going, sending accompanying bolstering messages about how often they logged in to access a favourite recipe or crafty how-to or simply to be cheered-up in a non-patronising way. Or some people donated and didn’t send a message. That was bloody nice too!

I did the photo shoot for the article Wendy had written with a Walkley Award-winning photographer who was coming to terms with lots of work lost and lots more time spent at home. He told me a story about spending his birthday (same day as mine!) sitting outside his friend’s front gate sharing a bottle of wine with her as she sat on the verandah. I didn’t tell him about my birthday because it was nowhere near that adorable. Then we talked about gardening and Chinese cabbages in particular. In the midst of it there was some photo taking and then it was done and he went away.

After that? My busy post-loss phase was over and I was ready to move into a new phase. The sitting on the couch and watching the days crawl by, too scared to do much in case things got worse.

This hypervigilance is an old frenemy of mine. I have written about it in my book When Life Is Not Peachy and if you’ve ever experienced it you’ll know it’s a heady cocktail of fight-or-flight readiness and adrenaline and ultimately exhaustion. When you feel like this it is very hard to coax yourself out of it. Your brain uses ancient brainy reflexes to convince you that the threat is real and that if you are not careful you might get eaten by a dinosaur. Or in this case contract a sometimes deadly virus, get arrested for walking to the park, get evicted, never get a job again etc etc. There’s lots of scary and slightly probable things to be scared of when you are catastrophising during a pandemic.

I could not complete things I started. I could not stop my thoughts from racing from one ‘what if?’ to the next.

I was taking my medication and trying to get enough sleep, but very often I could not sleep and when I did I was having nightmare after nightmare. Once I even had a nightmare where I told someone in it about a previous nightmare I had. Nightmares were my thing.

Again, I know I am not the only one who was going through this. When I asked my friends on Facebook how they were REALLY feeling, bad dreams came up lots of times. People were also feeling hopeless and scared and grateful and tired and sleepless. Some were eating what they said was too much. Others had lost their appetite. The latter was also me.

Normally I like eating, but my appetite had gone completely AWOL. I tried to coax it back, making homemade bagels and favourite childhood snacks and spicy favourites. But nothing worked. 

I was finding it hard to focus on my study (I was undertaking one unit in Poetry towards a creative writing degree) and I could not concentrate long enough to read a book.

Maybe I’ll read an audio book, I thought. Maybe that will work.

I eventually settled on a book called Jog On by Bella Mackie. Something in me was feeling like, with all this extra time I had on my hands, getting out and about could make some sort of difference. I certainly didn’t plan to jog anywhere, but Bella’s book looked great and I downloaded it with one of the 3 Audible credits pre-job-loss me had accrued.

I don’t really know why I was drawn in the movement-as-a-fix direction. I suppose the major reason was because I knew the power of choosing to make a big change and how good it can feel to implement that. 

I was at a point in my life where things out of my control were happening. By choosing to dig a bit deeper into movement and mental health (which Bella’s book is about), I felt I was edging towards taking some of that power back.

I read Bella’s book and I loved it. Sometimes I read it in bed. Sometimes while I was doing the dishes (something else I was having a lot of trouble doing these days.) 

Jog On said so many good things about running and its power to promote better mental health.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that I ran myself out of misery,” Bella writes. “It has transformed my life.” 

I wanted to transform my life too, but I didn’t really want to run. I’d run before, years ago, and ended up with sore knees, sore ankles, sore shins. But I couldn’t stop reading about running.

I finished Bella’s book and thanked her with a whole-hearted 5 star review, then moved onto another book. This time I downloaded the audio book Eat, Drink, Run by Bryony Gordon.  I had not read anything by Bryony before, but I did know her as the lady who had interviewed Prince Harry so brilliantly about his mental health and the host of podcast Mad World.

Eat, Drink, Run was also about running to promote mental health and details Bryony’s metamorphosis from non-running OCD and anxiety suffering boozy caterpillar to beautiful London Marathon-running butterfly. I loved this book so much. Two in a row! Unheard of! Ten stars!!

By this point my own anxiety was percolating pretty scarily. I was waking up at 3am each night (Is 3am night or morning?!) trying to lull myself back to sleep listening to Juliet Stevenson read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (try it! It works!)

I had to force myself to eat. I had little energy. I was in physical pain with joints sore and muscles aching. My asthma was bothering me, despite taking medication to prevent it.

I knew I needed to do SOMETHING fast, lest this anxiety and sadness shape-shifted into a debilitating chronic mental health episode that would scare me, scare my kids and sideline me from the things I needed to do.

If Bella and Bryony could feel a lot better from running, maybe I could feel a little bit better from walking, I reasoned. 

And so I decided to … walk myself well-er. Well that was the plan anyway.  Walk On! Eat Drink Walk! Walk for the Soul! (That last one is a reference to a book I wrote … oh never mind).

Here’s what happened next …